I'm in the process of developing a flexible data logger for power measurements, among other things. The main CPU is a 1284P, which has two hardware serial ports. One of the ports is currently used to communicate with an on-board 328P, which acts as the power measurement DAQ system. I'd also like to potentially add external sensor pods for things like temperature loggers, flow meters, etc. that are running on a smaller MCU like the 328p.

Based on previous feedback, the 1284p has yet to be supported in Arduino 1.0 and NewSoftSerial (the last time I tried it) did not work. However, I am thinking that a quasi-SPI approach to using SoftSerial would be neat - use one digital pin to alert the outlying board that its data is wanted, then use a serial connection to move the data. So assuming I manage to create a correct pins file for the 1284p and move it into the proper folder inside the Arduino 1.0 IDE, would softserial work? Or are there additional files that would need modification?

Also, has anyone run EasyTransfer across multiple serial ports? The examples suggest that only one data structure can be received, I am hoping that one can change the requested data structure on the fly?